


Your Shadow Is Not Your Shadow

by Go0se



Series: Whoever's At Home [3]
Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Each chapter is a sequel to a different fic bc that is how I currently roll, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Gen, Inspired by Poetry, Mental Health Issues, Mother-Son Relationship, Post-Canon, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 10:50:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13122207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: A point and counter-point.Tim has a chance encounter on the road.Or, after a long time away, Tim goes home.





	1. This Is A Photograph Of Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [syntheticaesthetic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/syntheticaesthetic/gifts).



> Thank you to Syntheticaesthetic who gave me the idea (I know it took me a while, but I had a lot of fun, I hope you like it!). Thank you to Rose who helped me edit, and as always, to you for reading this. <3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a minute! Hello! \o/  
> The deal with this story is that, a whiiiiiiiiile back now, I wrote a short fic from the POV of Tim W.'s mom in canon. Then I wanted to write another fic as an AU of that wherein Janet kept Tim after he got out of the Rosswood hospital and raised him, so I did. This fic is a sequel of both of those, about the same moment in time: Tim sees his mom again after a long absence.  
> Because of that set-up I recommend reading the other two fics in this series first; but if you don't feel like it, that is also cool. They should (hopefully) stand okay on their own.  
> As is befitting I am editing this pretty early in the morning/night, so if you find any serious typos please tell me.  
> Warnings for this chapter: brief mention of pill-taking and just, weird family-related feelings (canon-typical).
> 
> 'This Is A Photograph Of Me' as a title is from—surprise— a Margaret Atwood poem of the same name, which can be found [here](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/photograph-me%20), with a warning for drowning.  
> This chapter is a sequel to my fic "Death Of A Young Son By Drowning", which is the first one in this series. 
> 
> /

While he’d been on the road with Jay, they’d spent almost a surprising amount of time off of the road. There had been enough time in between totheark’s damned broadcasts for Jay to work on his research and for Tim to get casual manual labour jobs in whatever place they’d ended up in.  
His fistful of cash at the end of the day, plus Jay’s falsified student loan funds, got them hotel rooms and coffee and wi-fi. It had gotten more and more familiar to rest in strange places, almost until they weren’t strange anymore.

 

After getting rid of the tapes, Tim didn’t bother with hotels or checking the internet. He just drove.

 

He’d thought about trying to get into contact with Jessica again, despite what she’d asked him about on the last Entry, but decided against it. Either she was doing well and she didn’t need his god-damned interference, or—

Well.

He wasn’t too concerned about gas money, since he knew the right places to look for work in the podunk towns he passed. He tried to stay away from cities and any heavily wooded areas.

 

There was only so long that men could survive on gas station food alone though. When he felt his stomach turn after one bite of a dried-fruit bar he set it down in the ashtray and decided to make a pit stop.

He spent half the morning winding through cookie-cutter suburbs in some large city in Ohio, feeling his anxiety creep up steadily with every half hour, until he found a Walmart Supercentre. Good enough. It would have groceries that didn’t come with enough preservatives to survive the apocalypse.

The place looked almost empty. That was fine. Even though it meant he’d have to walk farther, Tim took a spot by the edge of the parking lot and locked the car.

 

The weather was, technically, beautiful.

 

Inside the supercentre Tim had such a severe moment of vertigo that he had to pause directly inside the doors, blinking up into all of the thousand-watt lights. The air felt wrong on his skin, dislocating. Tim felt his throat close up as a powerful panic swelled and threatened to grab him. Instinctively, he reached for a camera. There was nothing on his chest except his shirt.

Forcing himself to clear his throat, Tim finally moved out of the way of the door so the other shoppers and the cashiers would stop staring at him. Pressing the panic down into his chest was  an old habit. _Just breathe through it. Just. Breathe._

 

In about five minutes he was calm enough that he couldn’t feel his blood beating through his ears like battering rams anymore. He wandered back to the front of the store and grabbed a wire mesh basket to sling over his arm.

Tim didn’t like big box stores. He spent a minute trying to decide if he wanted apples or oranges, shifting from foot to foot, and the fluorescent lights seemed to burn onto his shoulders. The back of his neck prickled. Even so many months later, he couldn’t shake feeling of being watched. He finally settled on oranges, grabbed a bag and dropped it into the basket. One thing down. Several more to go.

 

He’d just turned the corner into the aisle with the protein powder when he saw her.

   
A wave of numbness washed over him, disbelief coming with it. It had been over ten years—god, more than _twenty_ years—could he really even be sure it was his mother he was looking at?  
  
But of course he was sure. He’d obviously got most of his looks from his mom— his complexion, his smooth dark hair. His nose, he thought, staring at her profile as she bent her head to compare granola bar prices.  
He hadn’t seen her in so long, but you don’t forget your own face.  
  
(Tim forcibly shoved down the thought of black eyes in the woods. He’d thrown out the mask. It was finished. He was _done_ with that.)  
  
After a couple moments his mom turned away from him and continued pushing her cart down the aisle at a leisurely pace. Tim followed her automatically, his own basket dangling from his hand mostly forgotten.

 

They walked through the whole grocery section together. She went from the snacks and powders aisle into the frozen food section and then to the dairy, picking up trail mix and pre-made tortellini and cheddar cheese. She paused for a moment in front of the frozen burrito section but then smoothly moved on.  
Tim echoed her steps, barely breathing.  
She had no idea she had a momentary shadow. She never checked behind herself. Tim couldn’t believe anyone could be so unaware of their own surroundings.  

  
Janet Wright (unless, had she gotten married? Was that even still Tim’s mother’s _name_? Did she still share even that much with him?) moved onto the checkout section, waiting in line at the only register that was open on Sunday. She pulled out an older version of iPhone and scrolled through it.  
Tim couldn’t see the screen. His heart beat in his throat. He was standing so close behind her that he could smell the perfume coming off of her hair.  If he wanted to, he could reach out and touch her shoulder, say something.  
Then the line moved forward. Janet put her phone away and pulled up a Southern smile, chatting politely with the tired cashier as she unloaded her cart. She paid with a credit card. After saying, “Thank you”, she rolled her cart filled with plastic bags out of the checkout and towards the exit.  


As she walked away, a memory hit Tim like cold water: him walking behind a nurse, turning around to see his mom at the other end of a long hall, her hands over her face, just before two large doors swung shut and hid her from sight.

“Sir? Can I help you?”  
Tim came back to himself abruptly. The cashier was staring.  “Oh! Yeah, I was just, sorry,” he stuttered. He hurriedly dumped the items from his basket and pulled out his wallet. His hands were shaking.

 

By the time Tim got out to the parking lot himself she had disappeared into whatever car was hers. Off back to her house--condo, apartment, rent-share? Back to her husband, boyfriend, roommate, maybe a cat or dog or a damn parrot, maybe other kids he knew nothing about and would never meet. Back to whatever _life_ she had here.

  
Tim probably could have chased after her. Jay had always been better at him at that kind of thing--he’d thought his fake detective work, tracking people and cracking codes, was _fun_ , outside of their circumstances--but Tim had learned by necessity. By now, well, he wasn’t _great_ at tracking people down, but he was capable. He’d found Jessica. He could find where Janet worked in Ohio, what she was doing here. He could’ve ferreted through online phone directories, town records--hell, he could’ve checked Facebook-- and shown up at her doorstep demanding answers or at least recognition. (Like Jay had with him.)

  
Instead, he swallowed and sat down ungracefully on the curb a little to the left of the super-centres’ doors.  
The change from his purchase jingled loudly in his pockets. He hadn’t paid with a credit card in years; too paranoid of Alex tracking him, somehow, or of police units in the town he’d been getting refills in putting two and two together with missing missing-person’s data and Tim’s medical record.

The sun blazed overhead.  
  
Tim didn’t have any words for what he was feeling. There was a hollowness, somewhere between his chest and his stomach. It wasn’t loneliness exactly. He couldn’t be missing her; that didn’t make any sense. But he wasn't angry. It wasn’t even bitterness that was lingering in the back of his throat, or sadness building up behind his eyes.  
There was a buzzing in his head, like always, but it seemed more persistent now. He felt kind of chilly. And he was shaking, Tim realized. “ _Shit._ ”  
Out of precaution he wrestled his medication out of his pocket and took a standard dose, washing it down with the Gatorade he’d bought inside. It was warm in his throat.

After a moment the trembling stopped, and he exhaled. 

Jesus. He’d been sitting out here too long. Tim hauled himself up off of the concrete, clenching his meagre bag of provisions in one hand.

 

  
When he was back in his car he yanked the door shut, hit the lock shut automatically and then slumped back in the seat for a minute.

His eyes found the rearview despite himself. He looked a wreck; hair greasy, brow furrowed, frown heavy, beard… yeah. Self-consciously he reached up to scratch at his chin. He hadn’t taken the time to shave properly in a while now.  
Maybe that was better, for him, at this moment. Otherwise the resemblance would be too strong and he wouldn’t’ve been able to deal with it. _Her skin, her hair, her nose._ He couldn’t remember what colour his mom’s eyes were.  
  
His own eyes stung.

 

He took a deep breath and scrubbed both his hands roughly over his face. There wasn’t time for this. Tim was no stranger to crying in parking lots, but he had a county line he wanted to make by nightfall.

Tim grabbed the gear shift and shoved it into neutral, blinking his vision clear.  
He got back onto the highway and kept driving.

 

/


	2. But Your Reflection

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a sequel to 'Morning In The Burned House'.  
> I got its title from the Margaret Atwood poem "Night Poem", [here](https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/night-poem), which is also where I got the title of this fic itself.
> 
> -

*

 

“I’m thirty-one, Mom,” Tim says into her shoulder. It’s a half-hearted protest at best.

 

Janet shushes him and keeps hugging, squeezing her son to her.  All of the worry of the last _five years,_ all of the uncertainty brought up as Tim dodged answering her questions, the hopelessness that rose in her as his phone calls every two weeks had become monthly phone calls and then had ceased to have a schedule completely; she tries to express it through how tightly she can squish him. For a minute she’s anxious and sombre and barely in her thirties herself again, waiting for a police officer at her door to bring her baby back to her.

Here he is, returned. Finally. Thank God.

“You’re my baby,” she replies out loud, just so Tim knows.

 

When she finally lets him go she holds him at an arm’s length away to look him over. His hair’s changed style since she last saw him. His beard’s grown out slightly, into the stage where she would’ve teased him about being a lumberjack when he was still a teenager. He looks tired, but maybe not more than she’d expect given how long he’d told her he’d been on the road. His eyes—so much like his father’s had been, although she didn’t say that—were clear and a little embarrassed.

Janet kisses him square in the forehead. She has so many questions, but the most pressing ones—how is he? _Where is he?_ —are answered by him being in front of her. And Tim was never one to answer questions under scrutiny, anyway.

What she says instead of fretting openly is, “Charlotte’s just made some coffee.”

 

Charlotte had opened the entire house up to the Columbus sunshine when Tim had texted in that he would be driving through their neck of the woods today. All the doors and windows propped wide, fans on full blast, light pouring in. She’s up to her elbows in flour in the kitchen, making celebratory perogies. (“You’d get sick of cakes too if you looked at them for a living,” she’d joked to Janet more than once.)

Janet shepherds Tim into the house with one hand around his shoulders.

When Charlotte hears the screen door creak shut she turns around with the widest smile on her face.

“Hi, Aunt Charlotte,” Tim says as he steps back from her exuberant hug. “How have you been?”  
“You’d known that if you had called more often,” Charlotte says sharply, and then immediately she softens. “I know you were busy making that documentary, but you could have checked in more, honey.” She takes his hands in hers and squeezes. “Do you want cream or sugar?”  
“Uh—no, thank you,” Tim says politely.

Janet feels a little swell of pride. She notices him somewhat-discretely use his shirt sleeves to wipe the flour that’d transferred from Aunt Charlotte’s hands to his arms. Reflexively, she grabs a loose paper towel that had been arranged carefully on the counter and offers it to him.  
Tim takes them, cracking a smile at her as if in apology.  
It hits her that it’s been almost four whole years since she’s seen her boy’s smile. It’s so good to see again that Janet’s heart swells up again for a second. She wipes at her eyes after she turns away.

 

Tim had last visited when they were still living in the condo in Birmingham, so Janet gave him a quick tour of the new house. It was a fine place to live, nothing fancy but not uncomfortable.  
Upstairs had three small bedrooms, including a spare bedroom so Tim wouldn’t have to sleep on the couch. What Janet didn’t mention during her tour of the room was that she had gone out and bought the heavy curtains that currently hung in it that same afternoon. They'd been a bit of a pain to put up, and didn’t look as nice in the window as the lacy yellow ones Charlotte had there originally, but they'd be replaceable a second time too. Janet noticed the way Tim’s shoulders relaxed a fraction when she told him he could sleep there. That made it worth it.

 

Afterwards, in the way of good Southern families which Charlotte and Janet’s move northwards had done nothing to change, all three of them get settled down at the table in the kitchen. They have their strong coffee in enamel mugs. The perogies are pleasantly crunchy and just cooled off enough to eat. Charlotte had fried them after boiling them, then mixed in caramelized onions, fried forest mushrooms and chopped bacon. The salad had fresh cut apples and three kinds of greens as well as purple onions and dried cranberries.  
They pass the serving bowls around the table, along with butter, dressing, salt and pepper. It smells delicious.

“So how’s your partner,” Janet asks in what she hopes is a delicate way when they’ve gotten settled into dinner. She quickly drops her eyes with the excuse of blowing on her coffee to cool her cup off. The wood of the table is scarred and scratched and pitted, but it’s sturdy, and the landscape gives Janet something to look at in case Tim is uncomfortable with the question.  
Tim had told her about the young man he’d been travelling with on one of the early phone calls. They had, he’d said, been making the documentary together as an independent project after the other boy had finished his film degree. Tim had always stopped short of telling her a lot about the other boy, though, like he was intentionally keeping a secret. He hadn’t even told her his name or how the two of them had met.  
Still, she got the sense that Tim liked him, even if he was exasperated and tired a lot of the time she and him spoke.  
It wasn’t an overstatement to say she’d been a little shocked at first. Janet hadn’t expected Tim to be gay. But then, in a way, the isolation he’d always felt in his teen years made more sense under that light. After getting over the initial surprise she had felt awful that she’d, unintentionally or not, made him feel like he had to hide this part of himself. Janet wanted to tell him that she loved him and would love to meet the person he obviously cared so much for.  
He’d so specifically avoided telling anything about the other young man, though, that she’d decided not to say anything either. As the phone calls had become increasingly rare, she’d decided she’d made the right decision.  
‘Partner’ is an okay term, she thinks now. Vague enough to mean business associate, but common enough that it could also be a way to discuss more, if Tim wants to tell her in his own words.

Charlotte makes an encouraging noise of agreement beside her. “Yes! How’s your project going?” She was, clearly, hoping he’d open up.

Tim just looks sombre. “I haven’t… seen him in a while,” he seems to settle on. He moves the salad around on his plate. “We finished the documentary and sent it in for editing at the, you know, contracting house we’d been working with, but, um. He moved.” 

Ah. Janet winces, then tries to cover it up by pressing her hand on her face. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she says.  
“It’s alright,” Tim replies. He was a little awkward about it, but he covered it up by waving his hand over his coffee cup and then taking a long drink. “I’m, you know, taking some time off of projects right now to sort some stuff out.”

“That’s sensible,” Charlotte said, still in the middle of her own plate. “David did that too for a number of months—backpacking.” David was Charlotte’s oldest son, who was only a couple years older than Tim but who they hadn’t seen much of while Tim was growing up.

 

Janet felt the familiar, familial guilt rise up in her chest. She pushed it back down with a practiced ease.  The first couple months she had lived with her cousin had involved a lot of walking on eggshells, before Janet had finally worked up her courage and told Charlotte flat-out how awful she’d felt to be imposing on her like this now when she could’ve put more effort into staying in touch when the two of them, and their respective children, had been younger.

Charlotte had waved the thought off with the airy way she had. (“What else is family for?” She’d said back then. “God knows you’ve had a hard road, Janet. He doesn’t give us anything beyond what we can handle. It’s lovely to have you here now.”)

 

“Do you have somewhere planned to live?” Charlotte asked Tim, raising her coffee cup as if in salute.  
Tim nodded. “I’m thinking Phoenix, maybe. I know it’s far,” he added quickly. “So I was looking at rentals in Topeka, too. Somewhere East. A change of scenery and all that.” Tm looked down at his plate again, reaching for the pepper. “How’s the cake decorating business?” He asked Charlotte.  
Charlotte, knowing when to catch a hint, took the change in topic gracefully. The conversation moved on.

 

After dinner they broke down the remnants of the meal like a smoothly oiled machine: Tim clearing the table, Janet rinsing off the dishes, and Charlotte loading the dishwasher.  
Chores finished for the evening, Charlotte went onto the couch to put her feet up—they had a tendency to swell when she spent too long standing without her orthopedic shoes on, and she’d been working on the perogies for a full three hours.

Janet and Tim retired to the side porch of the house to smoke together.

 

The night was quiet and clear. Janet looked up at the stars that were just starting to peer out from behind the clouds, and then over at her son. She was beaming.  
Tim was fiddling with his lighter and looked sombre. He’d been tensing up almost all evening.  
Janet's happiness fell slightly. She hadn’t forgotten that her son was someone who got tired around other people, but having the evidence obvious in front of her was still a wake-up call that was unpleasant to hear.  
Still, she caught herself quickly, it wasn’t Tim’s job to make her happy by being here. (She’d seen a therapist that had told her that much, when her job’s insurance had kicked in. Having an ill child left lasting marks, as it happened, but Janet felt lucky that she understood both herself and Tim better now.)  
“Do you remember,” she asked, and decided to brush off Tim’s flinch as just being startled from the noise. “Do you remember when I found the cigarettes underneath your bed?”

Tim snorted. “Yeah,” he said, taking another drag of his own. He looked sideways at her. “I was fifteen and an idiot.”  
“You weren’t that bad,” Janet admonished, fondly. It was easy to be nostalgic with it so much in the past. Those were simpler times, it felt like. Tim had been so indignant that day; fifteen years old and acting like he knew everything. And, well, look where they were now.

Tim’s eyes skittered away from hers, then returned. He smiled back; unsure, only half-true, but still a smile.  
_There’s my boy,_ Janet thought.

 

Then, because it was just the two of them and it was so quiet, Janet asked a question. “Tim, is everything okay?” 

It hung in air for a moment.

 Tim’s smile disappeared into a more solemn expression. “Yeah, Mom,” he said at length. “I swear.”  
“I don’t want to pry,” Janet promised him. And she wouldn’t. “I just…”  
“… want to know if I’m okay,” Tim finished the thought for her, tapping his ash onto the concrete patio step.  
Janet looked at him and remembered him being fifteen again; them having this same conversation except backwards. Her heart hurt a little bit. “Yes,” she said.

There was obviously something her son wasn’t telling her. He was an adult, he had that right, but if there was something that she could help with, fix in some way—

“Don’t worry,” Tim answered her, finally. He’d smoked his cigarette to the end while she had been fretting, and he squashed it against the side of the pockmarked old plastic picnic table Charlotte had sitting out there. He looked over at her with something like a smile again. “Everything’s fine.” 

That was probably the best she would get. “Okay,” Janet agreed, knowing well enough when to let sleeping dogs lie.

 

She put out her own cigarette and then dropped it into the ashtray on the table, then turned to Tim and opened her arms to him.  
Obligingly, Tim leaned in to her hug.  
The smell of car exhaust stuck to his hair, and the kind of cheap antibacterial soap they filled the bathroom dispensers with at gas stations. Janet’s arms tightened around him. She turned her head a little away from him, took a steadying breath of the cool evening air, then muttered a small prayer of thanks into his shoulder.

 Tim must hear her, but the only thing he said was, “Thanks for inviting me.”  
“Any time,” Janet promised, pulling back. She looked straight into his eyes to make sure he knew she meant it. “You call us any time.”

 

Tim’s eyes were shining a little in the porch light.  
Janet let go of his shoulders to wipe her own eyes, briefly, then smiled at him again. “There’s ice cream in the fridge if you want any,” she said. She was certainly going to have some after this. “Or some more coffee? Charlotte will be happy to make us some more.” Janet would make herself coffee, too, of course, but Charlotte always added things like cinnamon and brown sugar which overall made it much better. Maybe it came from working in a bake shop. 

Tim laughed a little bit. “Sure,” he said. “Not the coffee, though, thanks. It’ll be nice to actually get some sleep tonight. I mean, after driving for so long.”

“Of course, honey.” Janet put a hand at his back comfortably, and he leaned his head on her shoulder for a second. Together they went inside.

 

////

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you will allow me to wax pretentiously about the title for a second because I am happy with it:  
> In MH, a lot of the time Tim’s shadow isn’t his shadow at all, it’s the masked person’s, which is the same in both canon and this (chapter's) AU. But also, ~*metaphorically, his shadow is his reflection: the things he does that affect the world, where he walks + where his shadow follows him, show a lot about who he is (like a mirror), but only if people see it.  
> 'Morning In The Burned House'!Janet knows nothing about stuff that Tim’s went through or where he's been, so to her Tim looks almost the same. Her opinion of him isn’t changed, despite all that's happened. 
> 
> Thank you again.


End file.
